Education and Stockholm Syndrome: the road to recovery

In 1973, 4 bank employees in Stockholm were taken hostage and held by their captors for 6 days. Yet when they were released, not one of them would testify against their captors; on the contrary, they raised money for their defense.

In June of this year, at the Festival of Education, Amanda Spielman released the English educational establishment from its captivity to a narrowly data-driven paradigm of educational excellence. Yet so strongly has this paradigm held us in its grasp for so many years, it is hard to let it go. More than that, it is difficult to appreciate quite how perniciously this paradigm has permeated into our psyches, so that we find it difficult to detect just how far its corrupting influence distorts what we do. We suffer from a data-induced myopia. There are a myriad of possibilities we cannot ‘see’ because our focus is firmly fixed elsewhere. Our sense of what ‘good’ looks like has been so warped, we flounder when challenged to concentrate ‘on the curriculum and the substance of education, not preparing your pupils to jump through a series of accountability hoops.’ Surely ‘good’ looks like good results? Take away this guiding light and we are all at sea. You mean, my good results aren’t enough anymore? You mean I can have good results and still be bad? Those wicked jailers have taken away our security blanket; no wonder we want it back!

The penny is slowly beginning to drop. Now we don’t know what ‘bad’ looks like. Before, as long as we cleared those hoops, we were ok. If we cleared them in spectacular style, we might even be double ok with a cherry on the top. But unless we did something really horrific like having out of date plasters or the wrong type of fencing, we could be pretty sure we weren’t actually bad, as long as our results held up. Until now.

Of course we’ve always said there’s too narrow a focus on data and there’s more to education than English and maths and what about the arts and personal development and so on and so forth. But when our jailers not only agree with us but blow up the jail, without this familiar reference point we find it hard to negotiate the landscape. We keep looking back to where the jail once was to orientate ourselves.

In May, a month before Amanda’s talk, we held a governor away day to think about our ‘vision’. It was a good day. We spent much more time looking at our values than our results and ended up with our vision statement, which at the time I was really please with. It went like this:

Our Vision

‘Learning to live life in all its fullness’

Maintain and improve pupil progress and achievement within a responsibly balanced budget.

Reduce educational inequality through maximising progress for all.

Encouraging personal development in line with the school’s values.

Working in collaboration and not competition with local schools for the good of all our pupils: ‘all pupils are our pupils’.

But now, when I look through it with Spielman-spectacles, is see how prison bound it is. 3) and 4) are ok, it’s 1) and 2) I have the problem with. Let’s look at 1). (Forget the bit about the budget, that’s just an acknowledgement of the challenge of maintaining provision in the face of a drastically reduced budget)

Maintain and improve pupil progress and achievement.

We all know what this is code for. What it really means is ‘get good Sats results’ in English and maths. Now I’m not saying that Amanda thinks for one moment that getting good results isn’t important, of course it is. But we’ve forgotten that these results are an imperfect proxy for being suitably literate and numerate rather than an end in themselves. This is compounded by 2)

Reduce educational inequality through maximising progress for all

This is code for ‘make sure pupil premium children get good results too.’

Which is a worthy aim, as far as it goes, but it’s all just a bit reductionist. Amanda’s speech, on the other hand, shared a vision of education ‘broadening minds, enriching communities and advancing civilization.’ Now getting good Sats results will contribute to that to a certain degree; let’s not understate the case. Minds are not going to be broadened very much unless children can read and write well and are confident in their use of maths. There are many things that might enrich a community and advance civilization, but most of them are greatly helped by agents who are literate and numerate.

It’s the fixation on measuring things (implicit here) that’s the problem. To an outsider, ‘progress’ and ‘achievement’ sound like perfectly good things to aim for. But we all know that progress ain’t progress as the lay person might understand it. It’s Progress™, something quantifiable, something on a spreadsheet, something with the illusion of tangibility. Our vision statements may be vague and aspiration, but that’s ok because pretty soon they will be translated into smart targets with numbers and everything. But, as the saying goes, measure what you value because you will value what we measure. Our jailers measured us relentlessly and soon we valued their measurements above all things. We may have denied this with our words but our actions spoke louder.

Of course we want to broaden minds, enrich communities and advance civilisation. That’s a dream job description! But mark my words, before long someone will invent a ‘broadened mind’ rubric so we can report how many microGoves of Progress™ we have made in the mind broadening business.

Grade

Descriptor

9

A superlatively broad mind. Sublime community enrichment. Establishment of heaven on earth.

A very narrow mind, community very impoverished, civilisation put to rout.

(With thanks to Alex Ford for the inspiration and this great blog, written about those who, like Hiroo Onoda, are behind with the news)

A few people have asking me recently about curriculum development and wanting to know more about our attempts to create a knowledge rich curriculum that builds cultural capital. A question that sometimes comes up is, ‘Why are you doing this? How is it contributing to rising standards?’ ‘Standards’ of course being another code word for ‘great Sats results in English and maths. As if everything has to be justified – especially major initiatives – in terms of the payback in test results. Cos that’s what the prison guards used to fixate on, so that’s what we find it hard to think beyond.

But surely, I hear you saying, a broad, knowledge-rich curriculum will result in higher standards across the board. Why, I said this myself here. I argued that because inference depends on broad general knowledge ‘cutting back on foundation subjects to improve reading is a false economy.’ This is true, of course, of improving reading in a qualitative sense. However, while knowledge is essential for the comprehending of reading, the kind of knowledge gaps that thwart children in the Sats Reading Comprehension™ tend to be about why cats appear well looked after because they have shiny coats – not the sort of stuff you study in history and geography or science for that matter. The idea that curriculum time and financial and human resources might be poured into something that might not make that much impact on our data, on Standards™, is one that is going to take some time for schools to get their head around. It seems reckless, profligate when looked at from a prison perspective.

Although if we dare lift our eyes above the accountability horizon and contemplate the impact of a broad, knowledge-rich curriculum on the longer term achievement of our pupils at secondary school and beyond, we will see that we have given them the intellectual nourishment they need to thrive. We need to think hard about what words like ‘standards’ and ‘achievement’ and ‘progress’ might mean, when liberated from data-jail. Maybe it looks like broadening minds, enriching communities and advancing civilization?

[…] culture shift involved, for both inspectors and schools. It’s nothing short of a revolution. (I wrote a blog about this a year ago; in terms of what actually happening in schools I don’t think much headway has been […]